Hebrews 1:3; 2:14
When Ligonier Ministries came out with its Statement on Christology, called “The Word Made Flesh,” in the weeks that we Marinos were packing up to head to RTS in Orlando in the Spring of 2016, I remember thinking to myself: Really? A statement on the doctrine of Christ? Evangelicals struggle with just about every other doctrine. But surely we are at least unified on the great question of Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?” (Mat. 16:15). But after just a few months away from Idaho, where we are so used to the difference between ourselves and Mormons, I began to realize that Evangelicalism as a whole has assumed a historic doctrine of Christ because of how we compare ourselves to the cults. Extreme denials of the divinity of Christ “out there” can blind us to a very shallow understanding that we have of the Son of God. We tend to have a very low bar when it comes to thinking about the Second Person of the Trinity.
The two points today are taught in our two texts (Hebrews 1:3 and 2:14) but much of the language comes from Articles 10 and 18 of the Belgic Confession.
I. Jesus Christ is true and eternal God.
II. Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word.
The Big Idea is that the radiance of the glory of God shared in flesh and blood.
DOCTRINE
I. Jesus Christ is true and eternal God 1
1. We believe that Jesus Christ, according to his divine nature, is the only begotten Son of God, begotten from eternity. We saw last Sunday one of the clearest expressions in the New Testament of the deity of Christ, in Titus 2:13, “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” Hebrews 1:3 is another, because here the inspired author calls him the “radiance of the glory of God.” RADIANCE here does not mean a light that is reflected, but that which radiates from, as the Nicene Creed put is, “Light from Light.” This is a very crucial expression because we often struggle to get our minds wrapped around this idea of the divine Son being eternally begotten. But what this radiance—or Light from Light—is all about is like a sun which gives off its light, yet unlike a finite star in our universe, this Light does not dissipate or diffuse.2 There is no separation of sequence or entropy between First and Second, since what is Two in what is proper to the Persons is One as regards essence, so that the divine Son is not ontologically caused. This radiance of Hebrews 1:3 is a radiance of divine glory. That makes this radiance every attribute of God. And that brings us to the next words in the Belgic Confession.
2. [He was] not made nor created (for then he should be a creature), but co-essential and coeternal with the Father. The menacing heresy that made the Council of Nicea so necessary in the fourth century was the error of Arius of Alexandria who said, “There was when he was not.” In other words, what Arianism taught was that the Son was “like” God (homoiousios) but not the “same” as God (homoousios). The same early church fathers who used the language of the eternal generation of the Son also used the language of him being consubstantial with the Father. So here in Hebrews the author does not merely use imagery of a radiance, but that this Son is “the exact imprint of his nature.” Ambrose argued from Isaiah 43:10 the impossibility of calling Jesus divine and yet inferior,
Before me, there was no other God, and there shall be none after me. Who is it that says this, the Father or the Son? If the Son, he says, Before me, there was no other God; if the Father, he says: After me, there shall be none. The one has none before him, the other none after him.3
Paul speaks of the divine essence of Jesus as “the fullness of deity” (Col. 2:9), and elsewhere that Christ “is God over all” (Rom. 9:5). Three other places make it abundantly clear that Jesus Christ is, together with the Father, the Creator of all things: John 1:3, 1 Corinthians 8:6, and Colossians 1:16-17. Here is Hebrews 1:3 this creative power of Christ extends from original creation to the constant maintenance of everything that is not God: “he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
3. [He is] the express image of his person, and the brightness of his glory, equal unto him in all things. Before explaining the meaning of the Son as the Image of the Father, let me bring in a few other verses that use similar language: “He is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). And we Christians are being made into a new man, or new woman: “being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10; cf. Rom. 8:29). The word for IMAGE (εἰκών) is our source for the English word “icon.” But this can be misleading. What makes the Son an “image” in the eternal sense is not something that “makes” him at all! We are not talking about anything visible, nor are we even talking about anything that is fashioned as in having boundaries to his form. This Image fashions us, but he himself is unfashioned. How then can he be an image? When we think of our own reflection in the mirror, for example, the two are not equal—our face and its reflection—but the face comes before the reflection.
4. Great Christian theologians like Augustine and Jonathan Edwards put a lot of thought into this idea of the Son as the Image of the Father. Augustine began with illustrations of the Trinity—mind, knowledge, love and memory, understanding, will—but if taken as analogies too closely they would lead to Modalism.4 What he landed on was repeated by others, but drawn out a bit more by Edwards,
Therefore as God with perfect clearness, fullness and strength, understands Himself, views His own essence (in which there is no distinction of substance and act but which is wholly substance and wholly act), that idea which God hath of Himself is absolutely Himself. This representation of the Divine nature and essence is the Divine nature and essence again: so that by God's thinking of the Deity must certainly be generated. Hereby there is another person begotten, there is another Infinite Eternal Almighty and most holy and the same God, the very same Divine nature.5
But lest we get the idea that these thinkers were just speculating, they offer Scripture that agrees with this view of divine radiance. Christ is the illuminated image of God in 2 Corinthians 4:4. He is called the word of God (Jn. 1:1) and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24). This divine imaging is a communion in the Trinity but it is the fountain of his communication to us. “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (Jn. 1:18). One practical reason this matter is that even though everything is some revelation of God, where Christ is we have the perfect revelation of God: the exact image. All else that is called “image” is really an analogy. Each of them has some “same-ness” but the Word has “exact-ness.”
5. Eternal generation is not like physical generation. Physical generation is the copy.6 This will be important to bear in mind for the sake of our Muslim neighbors.
II. Jesus Christ is the Incarnate Word 7
1. [He] who took upon him the form of a servant, and became like unto man, really assuming the true human nature, with all its infirmities, sin excepted. Mark Jones well expresses the classical tradition by saying that, “the person of the Son of God assumed an impersonal human nature: that is, the human nature did not have an identity or name apart from its union with the Son of God … Rather, the human nature subsists in the person of the Son … Christ’s human nature only became personal (that is, possessed an identity) at the moment of the incarnation, when the logos assumed a human nature.”8
But this language comes from Paul, who says about Christ, that he “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phi. 2:7). This act of “emptying” does not refer to the divine nature but rather the human nature, and is a picturesque way of saying that the glory of Christ was veiled for the sake of a humble role. Another way Paul says it is that, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).
Why mention the INFIRMITIES of the body? God “make(s) the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb. 2:10). Christ’s suffering (passionis) is a perfecting agent: (i) first for him as our representative Man, and (ii) then as a legal ground that God could work on us as loving Father.
2. This miracle is described in this way: being conceived in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, by the power of the Holy Ghost, without the means of man. I have heard the struggle before, “Wouldn’t the Virgin Birth make him not fully human? After all, he wouldn’t have the full set of chromosomes and thus not full human DNA.” But just step back for a moment and consider the first man Adam. If we are worried about Jesus not having a human biological father, it should be remembered that Adam had neither father nor mother, biologically speaking. Furthermore, he was created full grown. Hopefully we are starting to get a sense of how our approach to individual miracles is often an exercise in special pleading. The real question is how any human could have DNA at all without divine causality! The fact that the norm is hereditary and the miracle encodes that information all at once is utterly beside the point.
3. [He] did not only assume human nature as to the body, but also a true human soul, that he might be a real man. Even the word “flesh” in John 1:14 comprehends both body and soul.9 The early church fathers had a language of the necessity of this full human assumption. What was not assumed could not redeemed.10 In other words, if God was going to restore the whole image, then Christ had to redeem the whole image. But if Christ was going to redeem the whole image, then he had to be that whole image. Why? One step further: The whole image had fallen and failed God’s glory. Our minds failed to think about God, our emotions failed to be all for God, and our decisions chose anything but God. Our bodies were then sold out to the passing pleasures of this world. In every way, our whole beings lied about God’s worth. So redemption requires that the Meditator be REAL MAN.
For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ (1 Cor. 15:21-23).
Even after the resurrection, Jesus drew attention to the earthiness of his body. When the disciples were afraid that he was a ghost, he said, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Lk. 24:39). That glorified body that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15:40 is, after all, a body!
4. Note the rationale for this full humanity: For since the soul was lost as well as the body, it was necessary that he should take both upon him, to save both. This concept of NECESSARY, specifically about the humanity of Jesus, is used by the author of Hebrews. A word parallel to “necessary” is also used by the inspired author, and that is the word FITTING. He says, “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb. 2:10).
As we move on in the flow of thought in Hebrews, we can get the logic of incarnation-for-salvation:
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted (2:14-18).
5. The necessity of the Incarnation for salvation in particular was a cardinal point of controversy among some Scholastics—namely, that some began to speculate that Christ would have come in the flesh had man never sinned.11 However, there are a few reasons to reject this speculation; the basic one being that it is indeed speculation, as Scripture nowhere offers another reason, but that One would come who would crush the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15) and that “he will save his people from their sins” (Mat. 1:21).12 And this salvation, God “promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word” (Ti. 1:2-3).
APPLICATION
Use 1. Let us avoid two other equal and opposite heresies that arose a century after Nicea. These are called Nestorianism and Monophysitism. The one is named after Nestorius (who may not really have been guilty of the error that bears his name). But the idea of Nestorianism was to so press the two distinct dimensions of the Son’s incarnate existence that it affirmed two persons: one divine person, the logos, and the other a separate human person, Jesus. Now the reaction to that from Alexandria was originally orthodox in Cyril’s Unity of Christ, but one of his followers, Etychus, sought unity to the Son by amalgamating the divine and human into one nature—hence the name, one (mono) nature (physis)—so that what was human was really just an outer shell of the true eternal essence, which really just makes a third nature! Charles Hodge explains the problem with this:
Christ’s person is theanthropic, but not his nature; for that would make the finite infinite, and the infinite finite. Christ would be neither God nor man; but the Scriptures constantly declare Him to be both God and man.13
And so the Council of Chalcedon (451) more fully articulated what was called the Hypostatic Union. But, “Who cares!” someone might say. I have heard many theologians say such things about the Christology of those early centuries. Mark Jones explains why it matters for our very salvation: “After all, if Jesus were in all things only a man, he would be at an infinite distance from God just as we are. In the same way, if Jesus were in all things only God, he would be at an infinite distance from us. As the mediator, however, he bridges the gap between the infinite God and finite man.”14
Use 2. We have only scratched the surface of the mystery of the Second Person of the Trinity who became like us. No matter what words I chose, which authorities I cited, whatever combination of Scripture verses I used, or what illustrations would have been better, we would have only scratched the surface. If we were to stay here for two more hours, or two more lifetimes, we would have only scratched the surface. Let me challenge you to make your first New Year’s resolution to immediately set aside time to read one substantive work on the Person of Christ. Whether that is R. C. Sproul’s The Glory of Christ, or the more recent, excellent book by Jones, Knowing Christ, or a classic like John Owen’s Glory of Christ, make it your business, and make it a matter of devotion and worship, to think deeply about the radiance of the glory of God sharing in flesh and blood. If you do, you will only have scratched the surface, but go there, because there is what your soul was made for.
As we sing songs and hear songs like “O, come let us adore Him,” does it ever occur to us that the trouble we have with worshipping the Son of God is that our theology is not deep enough to inspire adoration in the first place? And so perhaps we might consider giving each other this Christmas the gift of a deeper doctrine of Christ.
The Puritan Stephen Charnock scratches the surface of adoration in saying this,
“What a wonder that two natures infinitely distant should be more intimately united than anything in the world … That the same person should have both a glory and a grief; an infinite joy in the Deity, and an inexpressible sorrow in the humanity; that a God upon a throne should an infant in a cradle; the thundering Creator be a weeping babe and a suffering man; [the incarnation astonishes] men upon earth, and angels in heaven.”15
1. Belgic Confession, Article 10
2. Augustine uses this same metaphor, only with light from a fire, in De Trinitate, bk 6, c1 n1.
3. Ambrose, De Fide, bk 1 c8 n55.
4. cf. Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2004), 196-97.
5. Jonathan Edwards, Unpublished Essay on the Trinity, 1.
6. A precise way of stating (too taxing for a sermon) is a statement of Hilary: “The will of God gave to all creatures their substance: but perfect birth gave the Son a nature derived from a substance impassible and unborn. All things created are such as God willed them to be; but the Son, born of God subsists in the perfect likeness of God” — De Synod, PL 10, 520.
7. Belgic Confession, Article 18
8. Mark Jones, Knowing Christ (Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth, 2015), 27, 28.
9. cf. Turretin, Institutes, II.13.iii.1
10. This was said by Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory of Naziansus, and Cyril of Alexandria, to name a few.
11. This was revived during the Reformation by the Luthern Andreas Osiander and by the Socinians.
12. Turretin lists four categories of reasons: Institutes, II.13.iii.1
13. Hodge, Systematic Theology, II.3.3
14. Jones, Knowing Christ, 31.
15. Stephen Charnock, Works, 2:150.
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